Friday, March 28, 2014

Welcome to the House of Taboo. I'm "The Vixen" and your host for today. While Lia and Tony are getting ready to launch their new club, Taboo II, they've asked me to introduce the following feature. Lia signed up to be part of another book tour hosted by Sensuous Promos, and her blog is one of the last stops for for author Alexis D. Craig. All this month, you've been able to read one of four different excerpts, each tailored for the heat levels of the blog stops. How cool is that?So sit back, relax and enjoy today's smokin' HAWT sneak peek at Give Me Shelter.

Inspector Eli Miller's unspoken feelings for his partner, Bex, color his whole life. When his past comes calling, will it be the push he needs to seek a future with her?

Inspector Rebecca 'Bex' Mulcahy has lived long enough to know that love is a street con at best, and a dangerous distraction at worst. Any feelings she has for her partner Eli definitely fall into the latter category. Will her dedication to her job keep her from finding a possible future with Eli?Their latest case is protecting Violet Burrell, a young woman with scars on her soul stretching back to birth, who inadvertently witnesses a shockingly brutal murder at the hands of a sadist. Violet is determined to testify in court. Her strength and courage impress Eli and Bex, who will protect her at all costs.

But it is Violet’s beauty and spirit that entrances Junior Inspector Atticus Randall. Atticus is also assigned to protect Violet, and while he knows he should ignore his growing feelings for her, he just can’t stop himself from falling for the brave beauty.

Life in the Las Vegas branch of Witness Protection has never been more tangled. When the emotional landmines start a chain reaction, everyone in the blast radius is going to need a little shelter.

Excerpt

She was close to the edge and he knew it, wanting to take his time
before he brought her all theway off. Her taste was intoxicating and the way
she moved, he was almost as close as she was. Her fingers tightened in his hair
as she undulated beneath him. “Your tongue . . . God, Eli, don’t stop! Right
there . . . I’m almost . . .”

He opened his eyes because he wanted to watch the release wash
over her, and saw not Zoe, but red hair and bright green eyes full of fire.
Bex’s mouth detailing how good it was, moaning and crying out his name. She
reached for him, pulling him up to stretch out over her while she kissed him,
tasting herself on his lips.

He pulled back to brush her bangs out of her face, with a gentle
smile. “I’ve wanted this for so long . . .” He leaned in to kiss her again,
only to hear a banging on the door.

Eli awoke to the sound of someone trying to beat his door down
like he was a fugitive axe murderer.

At the moment, the axe-murder thing was an entirely plausible
scenario, given his highly stimulated state. “Jesus, I’m coming.” He allowed
himself a little chuckle at his own double entendre.

“Keep your pants on.”

He opened the door to Bex, looking wild-eyed and distinctly vexed,
and suddenly wanted to amend his last statement. “Is the house on fire?”

She stormed past him into the house in a tight gray t-shirt and an
ancient pair of jeans, smelling of oranges and something darker, something that
made his already hyper libido perk up. “You didn’t tell me! You knew she was
reading this,” she held the book aloft, “and you didn’t say anything!”

Eli closed the door, pausing to rest his head against the cool
wood, trying to think of some way to distract her, so that she wouldn’t notice
the tent in the front of his jeans. “I saw it the first day she came into the
office.” He walked over to the fridge, wondering if it would be rude to dump a
tray of ice cubes down his pants in front of a guest. “Can I get you a beer?”

Bex nodded as she paced from the living room to the couch and back
again. “I mean, Jesus Christ on a cracker, Eli.” She took the beer he offered
her and downed half of it, then tossed the book onto the sofa. “‘he broke the
band of her underclothes”? Really?”

He froze at the words of his dream coming out of her mouth.
Suddenly, a single ice cube tray seemed wholly insufficient. “Um, yes, there is
that.” The lack of blood to his brain had rendered his more complicated
conversational skills damn near impotent, a condition not suffered by the rest
of him. “Did you read the rest of it?” He leaned back against the back of his
couch, sipping his own beer and watching her sinewy movements. The jeans were
an intense distraction, low on her hips and showing a tempting strip of belly
when she walked.

“No! I got some take out on the way home from the range, opened a
bottle of wine, kicked back on the couch. You’d have been proud of me. I was
trying to relax until I opened up the book and read the porn you gave me
masquerading as literature.”

“It’s not porn,” he responded automatically. Eli was paying less
attention to her rant and more attention to her scent as she stalked past him
on her pacing route. Oranges and sex filled his mind.

“It’s an amazing book full of gorgeous imagery, but the subject
matter—”

She stopped in front of him, eyes glinting like emeralds. “The
subject matter is sold on newsstands under brown paper wrappers.”

“Technically, the brown wrappers were used for the subscriptions
through the mail in accordance with federal postal law. It’s done with opaque
plastic now, and sold on the stands the same way. But this book,” Eli
straightened slowly away from the couch, bringing him close enough that her
scent made his nostrils flare as he mentally held himself in check. “This book
is beautiful, one of the finest the language has to offer. I wouldn’t have
thought you to be a prude.”

* * * *

It was the voice of the phone call this afternoon, playful and
sensual. Eli was close, damn close to her, looking down with eyes that were
uncharacteristically dark. He looked... feral, on edge. His eyes dropped to
her lips and she found herself holding her breath. “I’m not a prude,” she said
finally, looking away and taking a step back to give herself some space to
think, to breathe a scent that wasn’t him.

Surprisingly, he followed her movement, keeping close to her.
“It’s a magnificent piece of literature, and yeah, it’s arousing . . .” his
lips curled into a slow smile that made her stomach flip flop.

“It’s porn! I mean, you can dress it up with all the awards and
pretty words, but it’s porn, and Violet gave it to AR to read.” She really
wanted to stop having this argument, this conversation, because all she could
think of was reenacting the scene she’d read with him instead of her
imagination’s rendition of him.

He chuckled quietly, his eyes never leaving hers. “Vi’s seventeen,
she’s pushing the envelope, experimenting. AR was, too. A little later than
most, but still, he was definitely testing the limits.”

Eli’s eyes got a faraway look to them that she was coming to know
very well. “Hell, by the time I was his age, I’d read it at least three times
and owned my own copy.”

Bex crossed her arms over her chest, needing some distance between
her and the crazy feelings roiling through her. “And when was the last time
your arousal led you to fuck a schoolgirl?”

“When it was age appropriate,” he answered immediately. His gaze
fell to her lips again, and she had the craziest urge to lick them, just to see
what he’d do.

Everything about him tonight was intense, like he was charged with
static electricity and looking for a place to go to ground. His flippant answer
bugged her, because he was only flip when he was trying to deflect attention.
Only one topic of late fit all those criteria. “What was it like?”

“What?” His eyes traveled down her frame and back up, stopping at
her lips again.

This time she did lick them, enjoying the way his eyes widened and
he responded in kind. “What was it like? To just get lost in the moment like
that?” The idea of first love was actually pretty foreign to her. A pretty
fiction of storybooks and her mother’s romance novels, not something that happened
to real people.

Her partner, she was noticing with increasing frequency, was as
real as they came. From his vintage Animal t-shirt, to his well-worn jeans, and
down to his surprisingly endearing bare feet. He had nice feet. She’d never
seen them before. He shoved his hands in his pockets and sighed, seemingly
having a staring contest with the floor just in front of his toes. Finally, he
looked back at her and she could see something was different. “You really wanna
know?” His voice had dropped to barely above a whisper.

She nodded, knowing her own voice would betray her immediately.

The corner of his mouth curled up into a half smile all the way to
the dimple in his cheek. “It was amazing. Here was this girl who I had no
business looking at, much less wanting, and yet, there we were.” He began to
pace, the fitful energy radiating off him again. “She was gorgeous, different
than anything I’d ever known, ever thought of . . . and she was mine. The taste
of her lips kept me up at night after the first kiss. Wondering if she meant to
do that, if she’d let me do it again. Was it as world altering for her?”

He was close enough to touch now, and she found herself fighting
the urge to do so. Run her hand down his arm, touch his shoulder, something,
she just craved the tactile contact. “Obviously it was. I mean, she let you do
it again . . .” She licked her lips again, suddenly pissed that they were
talking about another woman again. Kissing him, touching him, it pushed a whole
panel of buttons in her, the ones she kept behind the bulletproof glass.

Eli reached out and swept her bangs behind her ear, his long
fingers stealing a sigh from her as they traced a lingering path down her neck.
“Maybe,” he whispered, stepping close enough for her to see that his eyes were almost
black and full of intent.

He was going to kiss her and she was going to let him. She tilted
her chin up, bringing her lips close to his, thinking that just maybe there
might be some truth in that whole ‘living forward’ thing Vi spoke of. He, in
turn, wound his fingers in her hair and settled his mouth over hers.

Bex couldn’t tell who moaned first, but it was immaterial, since
they both jumped apart at the police siren that kicked up outside. She was
unnerved by what they had done, were about to do, would have gotten to sooner
rather than later, and wow, he was a good kisser, for as brief as she’d had it.
It’d been long enough that her mind had apparently misplaced that important
tidbit of info. “I . . . I gotta go.”